Happiness & Public Policy

I’ve only just begun, but I think I’m ready to recommend The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

Hecht has a fine pluralistic sensibility and a knack for getting distance from otherwise invisible cultural assumptions by relating them to historical precedent. She’s already convinced me that contemporary body obsessions aren’t superior to corseting. Of course, I liked this bit:

It is a modern myth that money cannot make you happy. We all say that it can’t, but, given one wish, a lot of us would go for cash. We certainly opt for money over many other pleasures in structuring our real lives. Part of the reason is that what you can buy with money today you used to be able to get for free—social contact and play that can fit neatly into your life. Shopping, television, shows, and sports are not deep, but neither were the common social contact and play that kept people happy in the past.

Good stuff.

I’ve just noticed that my Reason review of Richard Layard’s Happiness, “Happiness Is…Higher Taxes,” is now online. Check it out, and please tell me what you think.

I’ve just received Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis and so far it is the best “how to be happy” book I’ve come across. Good combination of classical wisdom, current research, and good sense. For those who don’t know of him, Haidt is a first-rate social psychologist at UVA who works on moral emotion and cognition.

Speaking of Darrin McMahon, here’s a review of his Happiness: A History by philosopher Gordon Marino. I’m really looking forward to picking this up. I think historical works like this should help would-be social scientists to see that happiness is a cultural conception that has evolved a great deal over time, and continues to evolve. The cultural boundedness of happiness implies that it is not particularly scientific to pluck our current conception of happiness out of history, pickle it in a jar of formaldehyde, and pretend that happiness studies are plumbing the timeless essence of a universal natural psychological kind, which, it just happens, uniquely exemplifies moral value.

But let me gripe some about the review. About halfway through, Marino mentions “our own age of near-pandemic depression,” and then, later writes:

. . . McMahon seems convinced by recent studies indicating that we are each endowed with a kind of emotional set point. According to this view, most humans are existentially unflappable. Whether it be winning the lottery or losing our jobs, after an initial reaction we settle back down into the same old repertoire of moods. As the scientists of happiness have it, we are both amazingly resilient against tragedy and remarkably resistant to radically positive change. In a footnote, McMahon concedes that depression stands as an exception to this rule — and quite an exception it is, because, according to an article cited in “Happiness,” millions of people are on antidepressants. I have had my boat rocked a few times in life and I have watched a few others go over the falls, and my experience roils against the view that, emotionally speaking, nothing ever really changes, or at least not for long.

And millions of people take Vitamin C supplements indicating . . . what? A near-pandemic of scurvy? Again, I’ll point to my depression posts here, and here, my depression op-ed, and the Horwitz and Wakefield essay that got me on this kick.

I’ve only just begun, but I think I’m ready to recommend The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Hecht has a fine pluralistic sensibility and a knack for getting distance from otherwise invisible cultural assumptions by relating them to historical precedent. She’s already convinced me that contemporary body obsessions aren’t superior to corseting. Of course, I liked this bit:

It is a modern myth that money cannot make you happy. We all say that it can’t, but, given one wish, a lot of us would go for cash. We certainly opt for money over many other pleasures in structuring our real lives. Part of the reason is that what you can buy with money today you used to be able to get for free—social contact and play that can fit neatly into your life. Shopping, television, shows, and sports are not deep, but neither were the common social contact and play that kept people happy in the past.

Good stuff.